Hello! I first used Sketchup and loved keeping myself organized with the "make component" feature. It basically lets you group a mesh and allow you to move the whole thing or edit only the containing verticies/edges/faces. You could also have a component inside a component inside a component...etc. It would also allow you to duplicate the component (basically create a template) easily.

(In typical open-source fashion, the concept of "groups" and "grouping" is prevalent everywhere throughout the system.)

As a routine matter of course, I will design "things" as individual objects, then place all of them into a single "group." This is not merely because features such as DupliGroups require it, but because it makes good sense to me. In fact, since groups can contain other groups (and since a single object can belong to more than one group), I find myself making "groups" even when there is (at the moment...) only one "object" in it.

stewkat wrote:Hello! I first used Sketchup and loved keeping myself organized with the "make component" feature. It basically lets you group a mesh and allow you to move the whole thing or edit only the containing verticies/edges/faces. You could also have a component inside a component inside a component...etc. It would also allow you to duplicate the component (basically create a template) easily.

Alt-D creates creates new objects sharing the same datablocks as the selected objects. To insert a new instance of a group, you press shift-A to bring up the insert menu, and you will see a “Group Instance” submenu listing your groups.

ldo wrote:Alt-D creates creates new objects sharing the same datablocks as the selected objects. To insert a new instance of a group, you press shift-A to bring up the insert menu, and you will see a “Group Instance” submenu listing your groups.

Thanks, I'll try that.

Do you know how to break the location/rotation/scale links in objects duplicate using Alt-D?

ldo wrote:Alt-D creates creates new objects sharing the same datablocks as the selected objects. To insert a new instance of a group, you press shift-A to bring up the insert menu, and you will see a “Group Instance” submenu listing your groups.

Thanks, I'll try that.

Do you know how to break the location/rotation/scale links in objects duplicate using Alt-D?

Nevermind; I've found that editting the graph - removing the key-frame fixes the issue I was having with duplicates jumping back to the parent.

ldo wrote:Alt-D creates creates new objects sharing the same datablocks as the selected objects. To insert a new instance of a group, you press shift-A to bring up the insert menu, and you will see a “Group Instance” submenu listing your groups.

How do you make existing objects share mesh data but not location data?

I use control L a lot for linking textures, and there IS an option for object date but that seems to copy ALL object date - including locationv (I might be wrong there).

I import from sketchup to Blender, so I often have objects that are essentially identical but in different places (simple trees for example) - I'd like to avoid having to duplicate one of them in blender, and place them in the location of the remaining (un-linked) copies before deleting them.

ldo wrote:You mean you already have two mesh objects, and you want to get rid of the mesh datablock attached to the second one and have it share the first one’s mesh datablock?

That’s easy. Select the second object, go to the mesh properties tab, click on the popup menu next to the mesh datablock name, and you can select any of the other mesh datablocks in your document.

Weird thing; if I open a new blender file and creat a cube and two cylinders, then use the Object Data tab to change the two cylinders in the drop down to the cube, they change into the cube, but keep their locations.

If I have a load of generic simple trees (just long cylinders) imported from Sketchup, rename one of them to Tree then change the others to the same using the drop-down like above, they jump to where the first tree is! Why?

I can tell you why. This is the difference between local versus global coordinates. Each object has its own transformation, which is applied to the coordinates of the mesh vertices for display/rendering in the final scene. This transformation can include, not just translation to a different position, but also rotation and scaling. If in your first example you rescaled one of the cylinders (in object mode, not edit mode), to, say, 2× the size of the other one, then replaced the meshes as you did before, you will find that the enlarged cylinder becomes a correspondingly larger cube.

However, if you went into edit mode on that cylinder, selected all its vertices and scaled by 2×, then switched back to object mode and did the mesh replacement, you will find it does not end up as a larger cube. This is because your scaling in edit mode was affecting the positions of the cylinder vertices (which you were then throwing away), not the overall object transformation.

Anyway, from your description I think the Sketchup importer is creating a bunch of objects that all effectively share the same origin, it’s just their actual vertex coordinates that are differently positioned. Which sounds like a stupid way of doing things.

You can check this, by selecting each object in turn, and looking for the fat orange dot indicating the origin of its coordinate system. This should normally be somewhere within the object itself, not way outside elsewhere.

Anyway, you can fix this by selecting all the troublesome objects, and in the “Object” menu, “Transform” submenu, use the option “Origin to Geometry”.